Donald Trump's three presidential campaigns were contests between establishment and insurgent, steadfastness versus change, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" against "burn it all down." Trump did not offer new ideas. Rather, the vagueness of MAGA and America First promised an idea-generation machine powered by a pair of nationalist principles. The implicit pledge that... Read More

The Pulitzer Prizes, administered annually by Columbia University, are the most famous prizes awarded to American journalists, authors, playwrights and others in the world of letters. A win can elevate an obscure book to bestseller status, turn a play into a Broadway hit, or save a reporter during a round of layoffs. So prestigious is... Read More

Thirty years and 30 pounds ago, Workman published "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids," my bestselling entry in the Gen X manifesto genre. I argued in snotty prose and spiky scratchboard cartoons that Americans born in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a set of challenges that made us the first generation of the 20th century... Read More

The Left is extreme, the Right is extreme. In the middle lies truth and reason. None of this is true — but it is taken for granted, even by many of those on the Left and the Right. The Left is right about some things, as is the Right, and centrists are frequently, perhaps usually,... Read More

The first quarter of this century in the United States saw the rise and triumph of "team politics," in which voters view the Democratic and Republican parties less as representatives of an ideology or set of policies than as opposing teams defined by culture, style and aesthetics. Democrats follow TikTok or Threads, shop at Trader... Read More

"You can kill 10 of our men for every one we kill of yours," resistance leader Ho Chi Minh told the French who ruled Vietnam as a colony in 1946. "But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." Historians who describe this remark as directed toward France's successor oppressors in Southeast... Read More

It happened here. The United States is officially a fascist nation. Leftists, in the 1960s and '70s, loved to throw around the F-word. Johnson was fascist, Nixon was fascist, Amerikkka was fascist, the cops were fascist. As a history student and the son of a woman who lost her childhood to the objectively fascist collaborationist... Read More

I could be wrong. I hope I am. When it comes to political predictions, my pattern recognition skills usually win. I predicted America's defeat in Afghanistan, its failure to find WMDs in Iraq, how Donald Trump would drive Americans crazy, and both of Trump's wins, all long before anyone else. There was, however, my mistaken... Read More

John Kiriakou wasn't exactly down and out. But he was struggling. Not only was John broke, he was drowning in legal fees he owed to the lawyers who'd defended him when the federal government came after him. Despite an impressive resume, whose entries included Arabic fluency, a storied CIA career and authoring bestselling books, he... Read More

Hello, Occupied France, from your Favorite Country, America! Happy 1944 or, as the late, great Hannibal Lecter put it, Steak au Poivre! It's me, YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, DONALD TRUMP! Good news, Frog People. No one ever thought anything like this could ever be thought of, much less done except by me, your favorite President, so... Read More

It's common sense, Republicans say. You have to show ID to buy a beer, board a plane, or land a job as a snow shoveler. Why not require proof of identity from those who seek to exercise our most sacred civic right, casting a vote? According to the polls, the GOP has won the argument.... Read More

Will there be another election? Americans have asked that question before, and when they did, the reassuring answer has always landed on a variant of "why wouldn't there be?" Even in 1864, in the throes of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln submitted to a challenge from a long-forgotten Democrat, General George McClellan, albeit in a... Read More

"Move fast and break things," Mark Zuckerberg famously ordered his employees at Facebook. His thought wasn't original. "Inaction is death," Benito Mussolini wrote nearly a century earlier. "Fascism is action in which doctrine is immanent." Do first, think later — or perhaps not at all. Clearly, the Trump administration subscribes to rapid-fire governance. Not a... Read More

Ten years ago, the shuttering of The Tampa Tribune shocked Media World. Last month, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette disappeared, turning western Pennsylvania into a news desert. Now The Washington Post is entering a death spiral. Hell, D.C. never got over the Washington Star. We remember what we lost recently, not what we lost in total. When... Read More

You may be thinking that Donald Trump and his Republicans have lost the immigration issue because voters are disgusted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement's indiscriminate roundups, thuggish behavior and their killings of peaceful protesters who happen to be U.S. citizens. Indeed, the polls are clear. Voters have turned against ICE's methods — but only their... Read More

Many people assume that Germany instantly transitioned from representative democracy to totalitarianism following the ascension of Adolf Hitler to chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. Actually, the Weimar Republic had already been reeling from the global Great Depression, unpopular austerity measures and overreliance on emergency decrees that restricted civil rights. Throughout the 1930s until the invasion... Read More

As a leftist, I'm heartened by the reactions of the citizens of Minneapolis and its neighboring municipalities to Immigration and Customs Enforcement's assault against their noncitizen neighbors. The killing of Renee Good makes the risk of confronting illiterate armed paramilitaries hopped up on aggression-fueling steroids brutally clear. Plus, this is Minnesota in January. Mixing it... Read More

The killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in a Minneapolis suburb has prompted a familiar debate over civil disobedience and government policing of the sort that typically follows these incidents, in which justification of the use of force, or lack thereof, depends on your political stance. There is, however,... Read More

Checks and balances, our teachers taught us, were America's ace in the hole. Human beings are highly fallible and easily corruptible. Because the Founding Fathers knew that — "The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted," James Madison — warned they crafted the three branches of the new federal government as... Read More

There is, at this writing, a better-than-even chance that Democrats will recapture the House of Representatives. They also have a shot at the Senate. If either or both happens, Democrats will declare victory. That's fair. They will claim a mandate. They will describe their win as vindication of their candidates and their ideas. Unfair. And... Read More

From an economic standpoint, governments look at citizens as workers, consumers or both. Most people, of course, are both: We work and earn, and we spend. Our dual economic roles inform the core of the affordability discussion at the center of current politics. For as long as everyone but the oldest of us can remember,... Read More

The Achaemenid Persian Empire. Byzantium. The Ottomans. Ancient Rome. All these regimes wielded immense power relative to their contemporaries. They dominated militarily, economically, culturally and globally in ways comparable to the United States' current superpower status. All collapsed or were destroyed. We Americans often forget that nothing lasts forever. And we always ignore the playwright... Read More

Americans know that they discriminate against one another by race, sex, religion, looks, income, etc. Yet they're unaware that the United States has a caste system every bit as rigid and objectively odd as India's — and it's so subtle that almost no one notices it. None of this is to say that the forms... Read More

Everyone's talking about affordability or, more precisely, unaffordability — and the issue is likely to drive U.S. politics for the foreseeable future. Affordability is subtraction. If your income is higher than your expenses, goods and services are affordable. The current discussion about affordability, however, is exclusively about the expense side of the equation. The implication... Read More

Democrats think they run against Republicans. Republicans think they run against Democrats. When swing voters existed as a significant segment of the electorate, that was at least partly true. In our age of polarization, there are too few swing voters to determine the outcome of most races. Elections are won by the party that most... Read More